The country’s “turn to production” in the late 1920s rendered “nonproductive” domestic labor irrelevant for socialism. Domestic workers were encouraged to participate in the Five-Year Plan by subscribing to state loans, agitating their friends and family in the countryside for collectivization, or by participating in state campaigns. The focus on activities outside domestic workers’ professional responsibilities signaled that intensification of domestic workers’ labor would not increase production. As the country was heading full speed toward socialism, there was renewed optimism about socialization of housework and disappearance of domestic labor, paid or unpaid. To facilitate the transition process, the labor union developed special programs that aimed to transfer domestic workers into the industries that were suffering from labor shortages. On the one hand, the new policy of mobilization of domestic workers into industry and the service sector created new opportunities for women employed in domestic service. On the other hand, it left housework without formal economic meaning for the socialist project and marginalized those women who remained in service.

Chapter 1 analyzes the shift in the understanding of domestic service from a problematic institution intrinsically connected to inequality and exploitation to an acceptable practice in the 1920s. These early conversations revealed the two main tensions in the understanding of paid domestic labor after the revolution. The first involved class. While quick to reimagine domestic servants as domestic workers, the Bolsheviks struggled to articulate a coherent position on the class affiliation of their employers. Even though employment of household workers did not constitute exploitation in the strictly Marxist sense, the practice had a distinctly petty-bourgeois character in the eyes of many Soviet citizens. The second tension had to do with gender. The Bolsheviks had no resources to fulfil their vision of socialized housework but still sought to mobilize urban women for work outside the home and for political life. Rather than encouraging redistribution of labor in the home, the state saw employment of female migrant peasants with no professional qualifications in Soviet homes as an acceptable solution to the problem of housework.